Apple Blossom Time (27 page)

We did that, I thought. On 7 July we destroyed Caen. We flew over and hurled thousands of tons of TNT on to it. We turned our guns on this city and blasted it, while its citizens crouched in the shelter of the Abbaye des Hommes and prayed for a deliverance that was slow in coming.

I don’t suppose anyone wanted to do it. I don’t suppose anyone felt proud of it afterwards. It was a cruel twist that we came to deliver France and brought death with us.

*   *   *

‘Grace, if you wanted to find someone, where would you look?’

‘What? My ears are full of soap.’

Grace shook her head and bubbles flew around. The basin balanced on a packing case wobbled. I picked up the jerry can of ice-cold rinsing water and sloshed it over her head. She shrieked with shock.

‘Steady on. You’ll drown me.’

‘I said, where would you look if you wanted to find someone?’

‘Is it squeaking yet?’ she demanded.

I soused her again, then ran my fingers through her hair, listening for the squeak that would tell me it was clean.

‘Clean as a whistle.’

Grace knelt on the grass, towelling her hair vigorously. Her voice was muffled. ‘Who’re you looking for? A long-lost aunt who’s got a fortune to dispose of?’

‘If only.’

‘Well, who, then?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I was just curious.’

It sounded so absurd. Where should I go to look for my father? No wonder Vee thought it was all so funny.

‘Look, I’ve a date with a gorgeous airman tonight. Absolutely scrumptious. All big blue eyes and wandering hands. He’s bound to have a chum just right for you. Why don’t we make it a foursome? Go on. Say yes, Laura. It’d be such fun.’

Thank goodness I had a cast-iron excuse. ‘Sorry. I can’t go out. I’m orderly sergeant tonight.’

‘Are you? Oh, goodie, what timing. Be a darling and make sure you turn a blind eye if I don’t quite make it back in time tonight, won’t you!’

*   *   *

‘Laura – you’re orderly sergeant, aren’t you?’ Marjorie Halse, admin sergeant for the ATS, looked as though she was cooking up something. ‘Got a little job for you.’

‘Mmm?’

‘Regimental bath.’

I gaped. ‘What?’

‘Regimental bath. Five o’clock. Private Madigan. Hasn’t washed since we arrived and God knows when before that. We have to do something.’

That sort of thing didn’t happen. Surely? I mean, we all heard stories in training that girls who didn’t wash were
made
to do it, but surely they were just the usual barrackroom rumours.

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Oh yes, I can. I’ve already spoken to the company commander about it and she said she’d turn a blind eye – as long as the orderly sergeant went along. I need you as witness that there wasn’t any funny business.’

I tried to think of something, anything, any urgent job that would keep me in my office all evening, but she wasn’t having any excuses.

‘It’s got to be done. At least if we’re there, it’ll be done properly. Otherwise the girls’ll take things into their own hands and use pot-scrubbers and Vim on her. Who’s to blame them? You imagine sharing a tent with someone who hasn’t washed since the midwife washed her. But there’d be hell to pay if they went for her.’

Somehow, I’d imagined a miserable little creature, but Private Madigan was a big, bold girl, brassily attractive, with greasy hair done in elaborate pin curls, chipped paint on her nails and a tidemark of dirt around her khaki collar. She was an orderly GD – general duties dogsbody – which meant she did any unpleasant task that was left over when everyone else had finished their work. The orderly private, the orderly NCO, the medical orderly carrying a bottle of nitkiller, Marjorie Halse and I all turned up and told her to come with us. She went quietly enough. Just as well. She was bigger than any of us.

Quietly, anyway, until she was marched into the bath-house and told to take off her clothes.

‘In front of you lot? Not bloody likely!’

Marjorie Halse looked at her watch. ‘You’ve got one minute to get started, otherwise we’ll take them off for you.’

‘Bloody cow! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d love to get your hands on me!’

‘Thirty seconds.’

‘You lay a finger on me and my mum’ll write to our MP. You see if she wouldn’t.’

‘Fifteen seconds.’

She looked wildly around at the five grim-faced women between her and the door and began to pull off her tie. She smelt like a billy goat. It’s just about the worst smell in the world.

Yet I felt sick with shame.

Her clothes were picked up with a pair of laundry tongs by the orderly private and stuffed into a sack. The collapsible bathtub was already filled with hot water and milky with a liberal dose of Dettol. Madigan stood shivering and naked on the wooden slatted floor, pathetic and somehow smaller. ‘That’ll take the skin off me, that will.’

There was shuffling and giggling on the other side of the canvas. The orderly NCO stuck her head out. ‘This isn’t a party. Push off, you lot,’ she ordered, ‘or I’ll put you all on a charge.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘Get in,’ Madigan was ordered, ‘or we’ll put you in.’

‘You and whose bleeding army?’

She sneered as she swung a leg into the water. Oh, she was dirty, all right, she was filthy, her skin was scaly with ancient dirt, her heels and elbows wrinkled and grey as an elephant, yet her neck was ringed with love bites and there was another on her left breast. I felt soiled. I was repulsed by her squalid habits and disgusted by my own silent part in this vigilante squad. It wasn’t to persecute ignorant girls like Madigan that I had joined the army. Sergeant Halse tossed her a bar of carbolic soap.

‘I don’t want to be a fucking soldier, anyway,’ shouted Madigan, kneeling in the disinfected water so that it barely reached the important places. ‘I hate you all and your fucking uniforms. Stupid bitches, stamping about and pretending to be soldiers. Bunch of bleeding dykes.’

‘Will you do your back, or shall I?’ asked Sergeant Halse, calmly.

Madigan began to scream as the medical orderly got to work with the nit paste, a revolting mixture of coal tar, paraffin and cottonseed oil, black and sticky. I wouldn’t have given much for her chances if anyone had struck a match.

‘If you think you’re going to get me back into that fucking uniform again, you’ve got another think coming. It’s off and it’s staying off.’

And when it was over, when the shivering girl had been handed a coarse bath towel to cover herself, I found that I was trembling almost as much as she was.

‘Proud of yourselves, are you?’ she demanded. ‘Think you’re proper little soldiers? Proper cows!’

She sprang with fingers hooked and slashed four bleeding lines down my left cheek. I gasped with shock and recoiled as the four other women grabbed Madigan and dragged her out, still screaming and cursing.

‘You ought to get that looked at, Laura,’ said Marjorie Halse later. ‘Lucky for you she did it after the bath, though, and not before.’

‘What will happen to her?’

‘For striking a senior NCO? If she was a man, court martial and the glasshouse. Striking, using or offering violence to his superior officer, contrary to Section 8 of the Army Act, in that he … blah, blah, blah. But since she’s a woman, we can only get her under Section 40, conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. They’ll kick her out, though.’

‘But that’s what she wants.’

‘Of course. And that’s what the army wants, too, so we’re all happy, aren’t we?’

And that justified everything? I held my handkerchief to my bleeding cheek and wondered.

*   *   *

I sat outside a café in a village street, with my scratched cheek turned away from the sight of people at the other tables. The elegant, stone-fronted buildings had been pale honey coloured before they’d been blackened by smoke. Most of the windows were cracked or broken and boarded up. The frames hadn’t been painted for years. Yet it was a fine street, wide and dignified, with broad pavements on both sides. Overlooking the village was a château that had been a German headquarters and was now a British one. Its outer walls plunged down to the bridge across the river and the graves of the men who’d died to liberate this place.

It was a town getting back to living. Stalls lining the street sold the rich dairy products of Normandy – straw-coloured butter, so fresh that droplets of moisture still oozed from it, and cream, crusted with globules of yellow fat, and cheese – Pavé d’Auge, golden-ribbed, packed in little, wood-chip punnets, smelly Pont l’Évêque and soft goat cheese, white as chalk, laid on bright green leaves. Works of art. We hadn’t seen anything like it in England since 1939, and not then, not ever probably, in Wiltshire.

I sat in the sun and revelled in the smell of my coffee, dense and black and bitter, a smell almost as good as its taste. It was real coffee, not NAAFI sawdust and gravy browning, or treacly Camp coffee from the bottle with the kilted officer and his Indian bearer on the label.

Housewives with baskets, as shabby as any at home, headscarves and bare legs and wooden-soled shoes, were bargaining their way around the stalls. They pinched and poked and squeezed and sniffed and turned up their noses with knowledgeable disdain. I thought of the patient, plodding British housewife, grateful for what she could get, ready to join any likely-looking queue, not to be budged even by an air raid.

There was one young woman who turned away with an empty basket and, as she went, the stall holder spat, just missing his artichokes. The woman might have been pretty, but her eyebrows had been shaved off, brutally, leaving nicks in her skin. Her headscarf was pulled down and tied tightly. I was pretty sure she didn’t have any hair under it. Nothing here for her. Nothing until her hair grew again and she could move away to a place where her past wasn’t known and resented.

How different was her treatment from what we had done to Private Madigan, I wondered? And what would we have done if the Germans had come to Britain? Pansy would have had nothing to do with them, of that I was certain. But how would I have behaved, or Vee, or Grace? Resisted? Collaborated? Kept our heads down and our noses clean and pretended everything was normal. Would Britain have been any different from France? Thank God, now we’d never know.

Grace was bargaining with a
marchand des brocantes
over a set of majolica asparagus dishes with matching jugs for melted butter. The plates were decorated with moulded china asparagus stalks, coloured an improbable green and purple. They had little hollows to hold the butter. How extraordinary, I thought idly, how French, to have special dishes for a food that was only available for a few weeks every year. Asparagus plates, oyster plates, strawberry plates, snail plates …

I watched Grace turn them over to look for a mark, run her finger round the edges to check for chips, then shake her head, begin to walk away, change her mind, reluctantly walk back … Anyone would think she was back in Cairo, bargaining in the bazaar of Khan el Khalili. Stall holders really understood bargaining there. What did she want them for, anyway? I didn’t know anyone at home who hadn’t dug up their asparagus beds to plant potatoes. Still, one day …

I turned my face to the sun and closed my eyes. I could still see its brilliant disc on the backs of my eyelids. My nose was freckling and beginning to peel and the scratches stung, but the sun felt too good to turn my back on it. For the first time since … oh, for a very long time, I felt relaxed and – very nearly – happy.

France. Twenty-five years ago – or a little longer, to allow for the months of my gestation – perhaps my father had sat at a café table in a village like this, farther north, but not so very different. If I opened my eyes I might catch him there, that tall, thin, gawky boy. He had sat on the sunny side of a battered village street, sipping coffee, watching life go on, in spite of war, in spite of hardships and loss. His legs were crossed, his tin hat out of the way under the table. His war was as near to ending as, perhaps, this one was. He would be able to see the finish not so very far ahead, to anticipate, to hope. He was a married man, with a wife who adored him, a child on the way and everything to live for.

And then he had risen from the table, paid his bill, gone back to war and vanished.

Grace plumped into the chair beside me and set the three-legged table rocking. She put her bargained-for plates on the empty chair.

‘I don’t know why I had to have them. The asparagus season’s over until next year. Coffee? Wonderful.
Encore deux cafés, s’il vous plaît, madame.’
She stretched out her legs and admired her trim ankles in their tightly laced brown boots. They didn’t look like army issue to me. She reached over and turned my cheek towards her. She ran a gentle finger down the four red lines.

‘I heard what happened,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Please yourself.
Merci, madame.
’ She spooned sugar, real sugar, into her cup, sipped and sighed with delight. ‘Mmmm, wonderful. What will you do when the war’s over, Laura?’

I closed my eyes again and gave her question the consideration it deserved. Well, what would I do? Stay in the army? The episode with Madigan had convinced me that there wasn’t a place for me. Go back to working in a solicitor’s office in Salisbury? Settle down to be the unmarried daughter at home? Unthinkable.

‘Laura? Are you asleep?’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘And?’

‘I haven’t a clue. Everything seems impossible. What about you?’

‘No idea. But whatever it is, it’ll sure as hell be boring after this.’

*   *   *

Scrappy bits of paper torn from a notebook and written in spindly handwriting with indelible pencil. A muddy thumbprint. No envelope. Perhaps it had never been written as a letter. Perhaps it had just been amongst my father’s effects – effects, that innocuous, catch-all word that meant the heartbreaking bits and pieces forwarded to relatives – a pen with a crossed nib, a watch with broken glass, a few Egyptian coins, a scorched photograph.

The Germans have made a push for Paris. So far we are holding them, but only just. One way or the other, I think it will end the war. I don’t know how they have done it, but they have really caught us napping. We knew there was going to be some sort of attack, but there has never been anything like it. Two weeks ago we were in Flesquières and now we are forced back nearly as far as Arras. We haven’t been anywhere long enough to dig in or consolidate. Snatch a breath, a cup of tea, bind up the wounded, count the dead and move again. For the moment, we have stopped falling back, but I don’t know how long we can hold the line here. ‘Gott Mit Uns,’ they say, God With Us, and wear the words on their belt buckles. Who knows, perhaps they are right. Mr Millport will know. We prayed for the rain and the mud that has halted our own offensives every time, but it didn’t come. Instead, the ground was firm and the air was dense and white and woolly. Ludendorff can even organize the weather to suit himself. Gott Mit Uns. We were deafened and dazed by their first bombardment. They opened up with six thousand guns. Six thousand. Where did they come from? Guns don’t just appear overnight. It takes time. They have to be hauled in, manhandled. They leave tracks. They scar the ground. Why did our Intelligence not warn us? Why did our aircraft not see the wheel tracks, not spot their camouflaged positions? Why didn’t we know? The earth rocked and shook under us. We crouched with our hands over our heads while fountains of earth and stones and rotting remains and fence posts and old tin cans were hurled at us. We were sick with the noise. We couldn’t think or breathe or stand or sit or lie or help each other. We weren’t men, we were less than worms. We could only cringe close to the earth and whimper and wait until the enemy had finished with us. They blew up gun positions and ammunition dumps. The roads were torn apart. The signal wires were tossed into the air and came down like string. The air vibrated and solid objects seemed to dance and flicker. The fog was yellow and crimson and orange. It sparkled and fizzed and blinded us with its brightness. The bombardment ranged backwards and forwards, choosing where to blast and where to spare. God forgive us, we were even glad when some other poor devil was getting it. We knew it was nearly over when their engineers fired the charges they had laid in what was left of our wire. And when it stopped, we waited for them to come out of the mist. But we couldn’t see them. The Germans call them Sturmabteilung, Storm Troops. They raced through the fog, smashing through the forward positions with bombs and flamethrowers, never waiting to see the effect, overwhelming everything in front of them. What they couldn’t subdue, they bypassed and cut off. They don’t reinforce their weakest points, as we do, but their strongest ones, cutting and stabbing and forcing a breach, then widening it and consolidating. It’s a new concept and a terrifying one. They even knew where they were going. Dear God. When I think of the muddle and confusion of our own attacks, when we can scarcely find our way over the parapet of our own trenches, it’s hard to believe that the Germans could find their way through and round our defences so quickly. How is it possible? We fell back and then back again, further and further, though never so far or so fast as on the first day. Now we have stopped, simply because we can’t go any further. We are exhausted. Our backs are to the wall and even the staff must admit it. Our only hope is that German exhaustion is greater than ours. They must halt soon. Surely they can’t continue the attack with such fury for much longer. Their losses are terrible. The war must end after this. One way or another. How can any country expect its men to do more?